Siri Founders Launch Lola, a Virtual Personal Assistant for Banking

The next generation “Virtual Personal Assistants for Banking” is here and it’s called Lola. This project, which is developed by SRI International which has made Siri, yes the same Siri which was acquired by Apple has been working on with BBVA for several years now, is the first application of what we see as the next generation of virtual personal assistant technology beyond Siri. William Mark, who leads SRI International’s Information and Computing Sciences Division, publicly announced and explained about the goal of the Lola project »

The goal of the Lola project is to achieve that simplicity and reassurance by integrating human-like interaction into the user experience. […] Creating more human-like interaction means understanding the user’s intent and then acting upon it. Since users usually can’t express their intent in a single sentence, Lola needs to understand conversation. To act on the user’s intent, Lola must reason about what to do, and know how to do it in the online banking system. These are difficult challenges, but when BBVA came to us with these needs, we saw them as a great fit for SRI’s next generation virtual personal assistant technology, which is based on conversational natural language understanding, reasoning, and in-depth knowledge of specific applications.